


Right Where You Left It

by alexanger



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-18 01:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7293775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexanger/pseuds/alexanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex sees the writing on the envelope, neat script that speaks volumes simply by virtue of being so different from John's, and he doesn't even need to open the envelope to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Where You Left It

They both knew the risks of enlisting, but there were so many reasons they didn't _know._ Youth – the assured invincibility of of being nineteen, hot headed, ready to fight – and later, the secret knowledge of each others' hearts, the glances they exchanged that carried the assurance that the universe would not be cruel enough to rip them away from each other.

But a letter from South Carolina undoes all those promises. Alex sees the writing on the envelope, neat script that speaks volumes simply by virtue of being so different from John's, and he doesn't even need to open the envelope to _know._

“Alex,” Eliza breathes.

He shakes his head. She presses a kiss to his forehead and eases the envelope from his numb fingers.

Inside is a short letter and another envelope, battered and sealed with too much tape. The letter – more of a note – is written in the same neat script, telling Alex two things. One, he already knows. He blocks it out and sinks into the numb blurriness in his mind as Eliza reads it aloud to him. The other thing is what John has left behind for him – a sum of money that Alex can't comprehend, and uncharacteristically vague instructions.

“ 'Please organize my belongings and donate whatever you don't want to keep. I know that you will be willing to do so in order to ease the strain on my father,' ” Eliza quotes. “That’s from his will. Do you want me to open the other envelope, Alexander?”

He shakes his head and clutches the envelope to his chest. His name is printed on the front in John's untidy writing. There's nothing else written, no words, no address, just _Alexander Hamilton_ in a hurried scrawl. Some of the letters run together, as if he didn't bother to lift his hand from the paper. It's so characteristically John that he feels his eyes prickle, and he has to close them against the hurricane.

He presses his lips to the scrawl out of – hunger? Desperation? Maybe some deep desire to devour John's penmanship, the last tangible part of him that Alex can hold.

“We are” to “we were.” Just like that?

Just like that.

*  


Eliza grieves too, but not in the same way. She doesn't know how this feels. She can't understand this deep, unrelenting ache. She saw him, yes, when he came home for visits, she kissed him then, in the comfort of the home the three of them would one day share; but she doesn't understand what it was like to sit with him on watch, lay at night in a tent with him, look fearlessly across the wartorn landscape so desolate and foreign that it could be another world, and know that through it all his heart beat beside him in the body of another man. Alex screams these things at her in a fit of ... something. The closest emotion he can name is terror.

She doesn't disagree. She doesn't say “I know.” She holds him, her lips soothing the tension from beside his eyes.

She doesn't mention that their son is just as likely to be John's as he is to be Alexander's.

He doesn't apologize.

Instead he asks, “do you think he was scared?”

Eliza doesn’t answer. Both of them understand that Alex knows the answer better than anyone else would.

 

*

 

There was one more thing in the outer envelope: A plane ticket to South Carolina, to the Laurens family home. For one person.

“Come with me,” Alex says to Eliza, and as the words leave his lips he knows he must do this alone. They can't afford this on their salaries. They can't bring the baby. Eliza meets his gaze levelly. There is strength in her eyes. He has to look away.

“I can't,” she tells him. In her voice, he hears that her grief has finally reached her core.

 

*

 

He lays awake the night before his flight. He doesn't know if Eliza sleeps. All he knows is that when the dam finally breaks, at 4:27 AM, she doesn't stir. He cries alone.

_They ship them home in boxes,_ his mind screams. _Like sacks of meat. That’s what he is now, he’s a box of meat, and you’ll never hear him laugh again, and you’ll never kiss him again, and you won’t even go to the funeral, will you?_

If she is awake, if she does hear him, she pretends she doesn't.

He is grateful for this.

 

*

 

On the plane, he pulls the battered envelope from where it was resting in the sleeve of John's sweater – his sweater now, Alex catches himself. He wishes the sweater smelled like John. It smells like smoke and coffee and alcohol. All things John loved. Close enough.

The letter is long, longer than Alex would have expected. 

_Alex, if you're reading this, I'm not alive anymore. Or I came home fine and showed this to you, cause I show you everything. But then you'll know I'm alive because I'll be there next to you._

He has to stop. It would be so easy to close his eyes and sink into that fantasy, and he knows that he can't let his brain lull him into contentment. When disaster hits, the worst thing you can do is become complacent.

But the letter won't go away. He closes his eyes, breathes deep through his nose, and throws himself into the hurricane.

Most of it is declarations of love – and forgiveness. There are words for Eliza, but they're sandwiched between promises that, wherever he ends up, John will always love Alex. It seems like too good of a lie to squander, so Alex allows himself to believe it.

The last paragraph asks him to go through his belongings, everything in the Laurens home that carries any trace of who they were to each other. John is begging him to destroy every hint that they were ever in love.

_Take home whatever you want to keep. Burn the rest. Don't let my father find out, please. I don't trust anyone besides you to do this. I know it will be hard, but you've done hard things before._

Nothing like this, Alex thinks, and he wishes he could punch the bastard right in the face.

 

*

 

His psychiatrist calls it dissociation. Alex calls it dreaming awake. He lets himself float in the cab all the way to the Laurens home. He hears himself, as if from a distance, offer words of comfort to Henry Laurens. Henry was never terribly interested in his son’s life, but he seems to have taken an interest now in his death. Alex pushes away the hostile thought and gratefully accepts a cheque – what John has left behind for him, for their child. He allows himself to be led upstairs to John's bedroom. He hears the door close behind him.

There is an air of suspension in the room, as though one day John will simply walk back into it and resume his life. The bed is made up with a green duvet, botany posters cover the walls, and on the desk is a framed photo of John and Alexander, teenagers, holding Slurpees and shouting good-naturedly at the photographer.

Alex gently tips it face-down and gets to work.

He wants to keep John's clothes, but each old flannel shirt and hoodie feels like a ghost waiting to move. He finds he can't hold them without the hairs on his neck prickling, so they go into a trash bag, ready for Goodwill. His old stuffed animals, the books he read as a child, his sports equipment – nothing says enough to convince Alex to keep it. He wonders idly if he should keep them for Philip. He wonders if there is any point in telling him, when he grows old enough to understand, about the third parent he never knew. He wonders if Philip will freckle in the sun, if his hair will curl, if one day he’ll look up with green eyes and laugh in that throaty way that John used to when he was particularly amused.

He sifts through the room like his hands are dreaming. His head is in the past. He runs footage in his mind – John laughing, smiling, weeping, swearing, yelling in fear. He sees John at 17, slinging a baseball bat over his shoulder, and then at nineteen, leveling a rifle at a target. He sees John's eyes light up when they kiss for the first time. He sees the curls of his hair, lazy and damp, bouncing as John scrubs at his head with a towel. He sees John above him, his face reverent as he sinks into Alexander.

Alex imagines John’s arms around him, John’s lips pressed against his back, but the warmth fades and he feels exposed, naked, unbearably alone.

That doesn’t stop him from imagining.

 

*

 

At one point Alex realizes just how absurd all of this is. He’s destroying evidence of a lie that matters most to the one person who can no longer tell it. Who cares if Henry finds out? What’s he going to do, disown a dead man? He can’t contain laughter; it spills out of him like bile as he imagines Henry Laurens solemnly disowning John, now that John is locked in a coffin and unable to care.

He drafts an email to John. It’s absurd - it reads almost like a short story, making light of this horrible situation. _You of all people would find this hilarious,_ he types. He doesn’t hit send - he knows it’s not his best writing, he was too haphazard, he needs to sit down and look it over before he can send it, but John will howl with laughter.

 

*

 

An hour later he realizes what he’s done.

He deletes the draft. What he really wants to do is smash his phone against the wall.

 

*

 

It isn't until he reaches a banker's box shoved into the back of the closet that Alex understands his instructions. The top layer is old transcripts and report cards, but underneath that, it looks as though it's jammed full of photos of the two of them cuddling, holding hands, kissing. He lifts layers of photographs and underneath are gifts – the t-shirts they made together, the rainbow flag they carried at their first pride parade, a cheesy teddy bear holding a heart. A whole lifetime of memories, packed haphazardly away.

A whole lifetime. John had 27 years to be born and grow and love and ache and die, and Alex feels a deep pain in his ribs at the knowledge that the man he should have grown old with will never even meet the son who should have been his as much as Alex and Eliza's.

In the end, he takes only the photos of them together. Just like that, he's done here. No amount of pawing through boxes will bring him back. It would be too easy to stay here and let the shadows in the room condense into comforting phantasms. He wants to press his face into the pillows, sink into the mattress John slept on as a teenager, but he holds himself back, knowing all he’ll feel is the cool of sheets untouched for years. He feels cool in his bones, airy, like cotton, like paper, like bullet holes. John doesn’t live here anymore. If he lives anywhere, it’s at home, _their_ home, in the bed the three of them shared when he was away from the war.

He has a son. He has a wife. He has a life. He wants to go home, hold his child, be held by his wife, and let this pain leak out of him in words he presses on a page and burns.

If he leaves now, he can be back in time to tuck their son in.

He pauses in the doorway, his hand on the light switch. His lips part and he closes his eyes against the empty room as he whispers, “bye, John.”

There is a soft hiss as he closes the door, a breath that might be, “bye, Alex.”

But maybe it's only an echo.

**Author's Note:**

> title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyKMQNndvjc)


End file.
